Elastic Waistband Shirt Tutorial

This is a shirt that I was messing around with awhile back but never finished.

At the time I was looking at a lot of 80’s style, over sized, off the shoulder seamed shirts.

I finished off the top but never put a hem on it. I was thinking some kind of high low or asymmetrical kind of look might work but nothing really excited me so I didn’t do anything…for a long time….like 6 months…but I finally finished it up yesterday by putting an elastic waistband around the bottom of it. And I’m happy with my choice.

It looks cute, I like how it makes the shirt fall, and Grace says it’s comfortable. I think I may make Grace several more of these for spring.

It’s easy and I’m pretty sure you could do it with any T-shirt pattern. You’d just need to make sure that your t-shirt is long enough to blouse over the top of the elastic.

So take your t-shirt and cut a piece of elastic that is one inch shorter than the waist measurement of your little one.

(Grace is 19 inches around so I cut my elastic 18 inches long.)

Now, sew your elastic together at the ends.

Next pin the bottom of your shirt to the top of your elastic right sides together.

(There will be more shirt than elastic so I pin the front middle of the shirt to the front middle of the elastic and the back of the elastic to the back middle of the shirt and so forth to make sure that the elastic is evenly spaced around the shirt.)

Now I sew the elastic to the shirt.

(You will have to stretch the elastic out as you sew to make it fit around the skirt hem.)

And that’s that.

You have an elastic waistbanded shirt.

(If waistbanded is even a real word…)

It’s just like making one of those elastic waistbanded skirts—except you are putting the band on the bottom of a shirt instead of the top of a skirt.

I think the shirt is cute from the front–but I like it from the side and back even better.

And I really like it with these shorts—too bad it’s still freezing out here!

(Luckily the sun came out for a few minutes in the afternoon and Grace was more than happy to put on a pair of shorts and run around outside in them for a few minutes…even if it was too bright for her to look my way for the pictures.)

I love the elastic trick, I did that with a sweatshirt that I couldn’t find a good color ribbing for (without a long drive to get some). I instead used the soft colored elastic on the sleeves and waist band.